Category: General

I've been thinking and talking a lot in the past few weeks about a concept that I picked up on from a Malcolm Gladwell essay that I read last year... the distinction between mysteries and puzzles. The short summary is that a puzzle is something that had an unknown but fixed solution, whereas a mystery … Continue reading More mystery than puzzle…

I've written about the Dan Gardner book Future Babble a couple of times... if you want to find out more about the underlying research, then the new Freakonomics Podcast covers much of the same ground in 58 nicely produced minutes of radio. Well worth a listen.

Attended a great talk this morning given by Aaron Bjork and Peter Provost about Agile development (and what support there is in the new versions of Visual Studio). The talk should be available soon on http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-793T, but in the meantime there were some great headlines about core principals of Agile development that are worth sharing. It's … Continue reading Ten points on Agile Development

I was listening to the Guardian's Tech Podcast this morning, and there was coverage of the new Amazon Kindle device that will be shipping in the US later this year, and next in Europe. From the sounds of it, there is another competitor on the block for the tablet/PC/slate/phone/reader showdown that continues to bounce around … Continue reading Device types and business models

I wrote a few weeks ago about what motivates people in general, and software developers in particular, to improve their performance. Since then, I've been reminded about a conversation I had about a similar topic with a recruiter a few years ago. Many organisations provide benefits to their staff that are related to their products … Continue reading The Chalmers/Clarkson Index

There is a way of thinking about how we influence people that distills styles of influence into "push" influence and "pull" influence. Push influence, either through straight assertion or logical argument, tends to be focused on telling people what to do. Although it can have success in the short term, over time consistently pushing people … Continue reading Push me/pull you

I’ve been in my new role now for a little over five months, and am starting to make some sense of what I am here to do. In essence, my team is responsible for making people in the UK technology sector, and in particular those in the world of software development and others in the … Continue reading Social Marketing

There was an exemplary case of chasing totemic numbers on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on Monday morning. A political think tank had published a report that outlined ways in which UK police forces were missing opportunities to save tens of millions of pounds annually by getting civilian staff to replace uniformed officers in back … Continue reading Criminal Numbers

There are some things in life that seem logical, but are just wrong. I remember early in my study of Sociology one lecturer defining this as the Common Sense trap - that there was no such thing as common sense, and that often what appeared to make perfect sense actually didn't. I guess that in … Continue reading The performance management myth